I picked up a finished basket and inspected it while Rebel continued to whip the line around the needles. The basket was solid. Each needle looked like a miniature piece of rope, the five splits fit together so well. The four rows of nubs studding the sides of this particular basket rose in S shapes, showing just how much the basket bulged out and then back in. Such patience, arranging all the needles! Such skill, whipping all of them into place! I whapped the basket on the floor and it rebounded nicely, showing its flex and strength. Watching Rebel coax the line between two needles and through a complicated little loop of line waiting for it, it occurred to me that I had a task somewhat like hers. When I penciled in my book, I tied together words like she tied together pine needles, hoping to make a certain shape with them. Briefly I wished I could make a book as neat and solid and beautiful as the basket Rebel wove. But it was beyond hope, and I knew it.
Rebel looked up and saw me watching her, and she laughed, embarrassed.
Another day the clouds would have given us a few hours for fishing, but the seas were running so high it was impossible to get the boats out. When I was done writing I walked to the cliffs, and there was the old man, sitting on a shelf under the cliff’s lip, where he was protected from the wind.
“Hey!” I greeted him. “What you doing down here?”
“Looking at the waves, of course, like any other sensible person.”
“So you think it takes sense to come down here and gawk at waves, eh?” I sat beside him.
“Sense or sensibility, yuk, yuk.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Never mind. Look at that one!”
The swells were surging up from the south, breaking in giant walls that extended from one end of the beach to the other. The swells were visible far out to sea; I could pick one out halfway to the horizon and follow it all the way in. Near the end they built up taller and taller, until they were gray cliffs rushing in to meet our tan one. A man standing at the foamy foot of one of those giants would have looked like a doll. When the towering top of a wave pitched out and the whole thing rolled over behind it, spray exploded in the air higher than the wave had stood, with a crack and a boom that distinctly vibrated the cliff under us. The tortured water dashed over itself in a boiling race to the beach. There floods of white water swept up the sand, and sucked back to crash into the next advance. Only a strip of sand against the cliff was left dry; it would have been worth your life to walk the beach that day. Tom and I sat in a haze of white salt mist, and we had to talk over the explosive roar of the surf. “Look at that one!” Tom shouted again and again. “Look at that one! That one must be thirty-five feet tall, I swear.”
Out beyond the swells the ocean stretched to the haze-fuzzed horizon. A low sheet of bumpy white and gray clouds covered the sky, barely clearing the hills behind us. Breaks in the clouds were marked by bright patches in the leaden surface of the water, like the trail of a drunken scavenger with a hole in his pocket, scattering silver coins from here to the edge of the world. There was something about it all—the presence of that expanse of water, the size of it, the power of the waves—that made me stand back up and pace the cliff behind Tom’s back, stop and stare as a particularly monstrous sea cliff collapsed, shake my head in wonder or dismay, pace and turn again, slapping my thighs and trying to think of a way to say it, to Tom or anybody. I failed. The world pours in and overflows the heart till speech is useless, and that’s a fact. I wish I could speak better. I started to say things—spoke syllables and choked off the words—strode back and forth, getting more and more agitated as I tried to think exactly what it was I felt, and how I could then say that.
It was impossible, and if I had really held out for precision I reckon I would have stood there staring at those sea avalanches all day, mute and amazed. But my mind shifted to another mystery, I struck my hand to my thigh, and Tom glanced at me curiously. I blurted out, “Tom, why did you tell us all those lies about America?”
He cleared his throat. “Harumph-hmm. Who says I lied?”
I stood before him and stared.
“All right.” He patted the sand beside him, but I refused to sit. “It was part of your history lessons. If your generation forgets the history of this country you’ll have no direction. You’ll have nothing to work back to. See, there was a lot about the old time we need to remember, that we have to get back.”
“You made it seem like it was the golden age. Like we’re just existing in the ruins.”
“Well… in a lot of ways that’s true. It’s best to know it—”
I snapped my fingers at him. “But no! No! You also said the old time was awful. That we live better lives now than they ever did. That was what you said, when you argued with Doc and Leonard at the meets, and sometimes when you talked with us too. You told us that.”
“We,” he admitted uneasily, “there’s truth to that too. I was trying to tell you the way it was. I didn’t lie—not much, I mean, and not about important things. Just once in a while to give you an idea what it was really like, what it felt like.”
“But you told us two different things,” I said. “Two contradictory things. Onofre was primitive and degraded, but we weren’t to want for the old time to come back either, because it was evil. We didn’t have anything left that was ours, that we could be proud of. You confused us!”
Abruptly he looked past me to the sea. “All right,” he said. “Maybe I did. Maybe I made a mistake.” His voice grew querulous: “I ain’t some kind of great wise man, boy. I’m just another fool like you.”
Awkwardly I turned and paced around a bit more. He didn’t have any good reason for lying to us like he did. He had done it for fun. To make the stories sound better. To entertain himself.
I went over and plopped down beside him. We watched the sandbars plow a few more swells to mush. It looked like the ocean wanted to wash the whole valley away. Tom threw a few pebbles down at the beach. Gloomily he sighed.
“You know where I’d like to be when I die?” he said.
“No.”
“I’d like to be on top of Mount Whitney.”
“What?”
“Yeah. When I feel the end coming I’d like to hike inland and up three-ninety-five, and then up to the top of Mount Whitney. It’s just a walk to the top, but it’s the tallest mountain in the United States. The second tallest, excuse me. There’s a little stone hut up there, and I could stay in that and watch the world till the end. Like the old Indians did.”
“Ah,” I said. “Sounds like a nice way to go.” I didn’t know what else to say. I looked at him—really looked at him, I mean. It was funny, but now that I knew he was eighty and not a hundred and five, he looked older. Of course his illness had wasted him some. But I think it was mainly because living a hundred and five years was in the nature of a miracle, which could be extended indefinitely, while eighty was just old. He was an old man, a strange old man, that was all, and now I could see it. I was more impressed he had made it to eighty than I ever used to be that he had made it to one hundred and five. And that felt right.